words, growing slower and more dispirited as the vacuous meanings sink in. One ‘poem’ went like this: White sheep white sheep, On a blue hill, When the wind stops, You all stand still. When the wind blows, You walk away slow; White sheep, white sheep, Where do you go? I blubbed with rage and disappointment when I finally deciphered that one. However – between page 56 and page 63 there is no voice, only a terrified silence, because the Hobyahs inhabit those six pages. Someone who knows tells me that ‘Hobyahs’ were originally inhabitants of the Ger man forests. They don’t feel Ger man to me, despite the lady illustrator, who draws stout-bodied long-nosed creatures in the usual fake medieval fig, with black cloaks and flat, black, backward-pointing hoods. I knew the Hobyahs were lithe, naked, black, and moved terribly fast; and that wherever they might have come from, now they live here, in the grey Australian bush. The Hobyah story goes like this. A Little Old Man and a Little Old Woman lived in a bark hut ‘in the middle of the bush’. (This struck me as wrong: how can the bush, with no beginning and no end, have a middle?) So … they lived with the bush all around them, and they had a little dog,Yellow Dog Dingo, for company and protection. They needed the dog because when it was dark the Hobyahs would come: Out of the gloomy gullies came the Hobyahs, creep creep creeping. Through the grey gumtrees came the Hobyahs, run, run, running. Skip, skip, skipping on the ends of their toes came the Hobyahs. The first night the Hobyahs came Yellow Dog Dingo barked and scared them off.The Little Old Man responded with the stupid cruelty customary among nursery-tale males: he cut off the dog’s tail. When Yellow Dog Dingo barked the next night he cut off his legs. When on the third night the little wriggling trunk still barked, he cut off its head. So on the next and fourth night the severely truncated dog could not bark and there was nothing to stop the Hobyahs. So they came running lightly through the dark and they pulled down the bark hut, the Little Old Man hid under the bed and the Hobyahs grabbed the Little Old Woman, put her in a sack and made off with her. What did they want with her? Did they want to eat her? To violate her? To violate and then eat her? I never knew. All I knew was that the Hobyahs poked her with their long skinny fingers as she jounced in the sack. Then they settled to sleep because the day was dawning. (Hobyahs sleep during the day. They do their mischief at night.) The Little Old Man, who had remained snugly hiding while the house-pulling-down and the kidnapping and the pokings were going on, repent- ed his earlier actions and reassembled the little dog, having frugally kept the bits. The reconstituted Yellow Dog Dingo tracked the Hobyahs to their lair, chewed a hole in the sack, and let the Little Old Woman out. She (like an idiot) ran straight back to the Little Old Man and the reassembled bark hut while Yellow Dog Dingo hid himself in the sack, and when the Hobyahs woke up and started poking him, thinking he was the Little Old Woman, he jumped out and ate them all up. Then like an idiot he ran back to the Little Old Man who had recently dismembered him. That’s what it says in the book. But I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. There were too many Hobyahs. How could one little dog possibly eat them all up? At best he might have bitten two or three, and then made a run for it. So they must be still out there, in the bush. Among the grey gum trees. In the gloomy gullies. I don’t know where they came from but I think they’ve lived here for a very long time. They have dogs, but their dogs don’t bark, and they don’t need bark huts because they don’t feel the cold and they’re not afraid of the bush or of the dark. They can run through the bush in the dark if they want to. And in the night they come creeping, come running, come skipping on their long swift feet to get the people fool enough to live in bark huts deep in the bush. You don’t believe me? Try whispering ‘Hobyahs!’ to anyone over forty when you’re deep in the bush, when the dusk comes creeping up from the gullies between the tall grey gums. Then watch them run. Inga Clendinnen is a distinguished historian and multi-award-winning writer. Agamemnon’s Kiss is a selection of 19 articles and essays published in various newspapers and magazines over the past ten years. Hobyahs! was first published in the Age newspaper, Melbourne, in 2003. Agamemnon’s Kiss is published by Text, rrp $32.95. They must still be out there, in the bush. Among the grey gum trees. In the gloomy gullies. They can run through the bush in the dark if they want to. And in the night they come creeping, come running, come skipping ... NOVEMBER 2006 ı goodreading 51